LIFElabs’ tech development seems to be constantly on the move, with innovative iterations and improvements being made to the likes of our LIFEwallet each and every month.

With the latest release set to be pushed today (Monday 13th May 2019) fans and current users continue to give us feedback on the quality of the user experience and the platform’s benefits for holding, transacting and the transferring of digital currencies.

So what does this actually mean for users who already have or plan to download and use our LIFEwallet App in the future?

Well naturally LIFElabs likes to stay ahead of the technology curve when it comes to blockchain technology which is why we have upgraded our ‘LIFE – Simply for Everyone’ app from the dated legacy Bitcoin protocol to a SegWit protocol.

It’s not always the things you can see which make the biggest difference, this is also true with the latest upgrade features of our app. If you have ever sent or received Bitcoin in the past, you may know that it’s not the simplest of experiences when it comes to transactions fees and speeds – this is due to each block having a set size of 1mb, which is quickly bloated by large amounts of data in each transaction. Essentially, SegWit introduces a smarter way to “filter out” the non-important data in the transactions which effectively means a higher transaction speed and therefore lower fee’s. Great eh!

Obviously, all funds will continue to be maintained as before, any pending to receive funds will be received and any previous addresses being used will still be a valid address. But new addresses will be generated using the SegWit format to make use of the improvements. See below for a more detailed outline of what SegWit is.

Additional features that have also been added include:

BTC and ETH address validation improved and the inclusion of auto trimming unnecessary text – What this means is that now, we will be running pre-transaction validation on addresses, so if your BTC or ETH address is not correct for any reason, it will show you a warning.

Addresses copied from other apps/websites sometimes comes with different formats like:
`bitcoin:1Ma2DrB68K7jmAwaomqZNRMCvgQrNjE2QC?amout=0.003&text=Dinner` or `ethereum:0x9334f0aa73d2744b97b0b1be6896788ee46f4aaa?amount=0.01`
This new version of the app will be able to extract just the address information and trim the rest of the address.

Decimal punctuation now localised. Use of ‘,’ or ‘.’ for your decimal values based on your device regional settings. Here we are making the app more user-friendly and adapted to your regional country standards. In some parts of the world they use `.` as a decimal separator and in others they use `,` for exactly the same purpose.
So the same number will be displayed in UK or USA as 10,000.21 – If we are in other countries like Germany or France, for example, it will be displayed as 10.000,21 – Some apps force you to use the `.` notation regardless of where you are. But in our case, we have now taken the measures to adapt to your regional across all aspects of our LIFEwallet.

A definition of SegWit (Segregated Witness)

SegWit is the process by which the block size limit on a blockchain is increased by removing signature data from Bitcoin transactions. When certain parts of a transaction are removed, this frees up space or capacity to add more transactions to the chain. Segregate means to separate, and Witnesses are the transaction signatures. Hence, Segregated Witness, in short, means to separate transaction signatures. The concept of SegWit was formulated by Bitcoin developer, Pieter Wuille.

SegWit (short for Segregated Witness) is a protocol upgrade that changes the way data is stored.

Many hailed it as a long-awaited solution to bitcoin’s scaling problem. The maximum block size in the main protocol is 1MB, which restricts the number of transactions bitcoin can process to approximately 7 per second. This was going to limit Bitcoin’s potential growth, and prevent it from becoming a usable high-volume payment system.

SegWit fixed transaction malleability by removing the signature information (otherwise known as the “witness” information) and storing it outside the base transaction block. With that, signatures and scripts can be changed without affecting the transaction id.

A side benefit that is taking on much greater importance is that, without the signature information, the transactions weigh much less. This means that more can fit in a block, and Bitcoin can process a greater throughput without changing the block size. So, SegWit does not increase the block size limit, but it does enable a greater number of transactions within the 1MB blocks. The 4MB cap includes the segregated witness data, which technically does not form part of the 1MB base transaction block.